Why you should not develop color film at home.

Developing B&W film is like making a pasta sauce or salad dressing. Developing color film at home is like cookie cutting. It’s a repetitive and standardized process. 

No doubt, if there’s no lab around, by all means develop your color film at home. Other than that I don’t understand why people do this at home. Developing color film is boring. It’s always the same procedure. If you deviate you get bad results. You can’t try new things like in B&W. You just have to follow the procedure. The process is meant to be done by machines. It’s simply not fun. Even if it works out and trust me, most of the time it won’t.

With color film you cannot easily change contrast for example. I think there’s a way with masks etc but it’s an advanced concept hardly ever used  nowadays. With B&W film you can tweak so many variables by altering the way you process your film. If you deviate with color film you get color shifts. Color shifts are ugly. They are so ugly that it’s almost gag reflex inducing. My advice is: leave color film processing to the labs and enjoy B&W at home. It’s a much more rewarding process. 

Scanning with Google PhotoScan

Scanning film really isn’t much fun. It takes so much time that could be spent shooting. My Frontier and Pakon Scanners made the task a little bit easier but it still takes way too much time. Over the past few years I sort of started drifting away from scanning all together. I used to be obsessed with getting good scans. Especially color negatives were difficult. The scans just never looked as vibrant as the prints unless I had them scanned by a professional lab. Consumer scanners just don’t work for negative film. Even black and white film somehow doesn’t look right. At some point I had 20 some un-scanned rolls and just couldn’t get myself to scan them. I also realized that the look I like the best is what I get from my darkroom prints. I‘ forget how, but I stumbled upon Google PhotoScan in the AppStore and scanned a few of my prints. This app is absolutely amazing. I scanned old polaroids, old 4x6 color prints. The app even color corrects faded photos.

I then tried it on my 5x7 B&W prints. Super quick and easy. It really beats any flatbed scanner.   

B&W print on Ilford Art300 paper.

Lith print on Fomatone 131 paper.

I now stopped scanning my film altogether. I make a contact sheet of every roll I shoot and print the frames I like best. If I want to share anything I tape the print to my wall and pull out Google PhotoScan. No more long evening spent working with shitty scanners. Some may say I spend more time in the darkroom now but that’s what I prefer. I already spend hours in front of a computer at work everyday.  I much prefer the smell of developer in my darkroom.